Finding our stance is not always so easy...

The New Mexican

Thanks, Bill Christison, for your willingness to seek the truth and to proclaim it.

Former CIA agent Bill Christison advocated for Palestinians

Kathy Christison said that when her husband was ready to retire, he was ready to leave Washington, D.C. — both to get away from the hot and humid summers and from the agency, which she said frequently tries to rope in retired employees for consulting work. Los Angeles was too smoggy and Arizona was too hot. They had friends — also ex-CIA — who lived in Santa Fe, so they bought a house and moved here in December 1979.

The political views of the couple began to change. "It was a slow evolution," said Kathy Christison, who said she voted for Ronald Reagan in the 1980s.

"Bill used to say that the end of the Cold War is what made him start thinking differently," she said. "There was supposed to be a 'peace dividend,' but that just never came to be. He just began to realize that the U.S. should not be the only superpower." The fall of the Soviet Union, she said, just prompted the U.S. to "essentially advance its imperial interests."

Kathy Christison said she owes her own changing views to moving to Santa Fe and "getting away from the politically elite."

She said, "I began to see what is really important — helping people to help themselves." Having worked seven years on Mideast issues in the CIA, she was interested in the plight of Palestinians in Israel. Both she and her husband became sharp critics of Israeli policies as well as this country's Mideast policy.

The following is the conclusion of Arendt's essay. With the explanatory notes offered above, I think this passage can be appreciated on its own. The influence of Arendt's observations can be plainly seen in my most recent piece, "Supporters of Evil." Arendt writes:

In our context, all that matters is the insight that no man, however strong, can ever accomplish anything, good or bad, without the help of others. What you have here is the notion of an equality which accounts for a "leader" who is never more than primus inter pares, the first among his peers. Those who seem to obey him actually support him and his enterprise; without such "obedience" he would be helpless, whereas in the nursery or under conditions of slavery -- the two spheres in which the notion of obedience made sense and from which it was then transposed into political matters -- it is the child or the slave who becomes helpless if he refuses to "cooperate." Even in a strictly bureaucratic organization, with its fixed hierarchical order, it would make much more sense to look upon the functioning of the "cogs" and wheels in terms of overall support for a common enterprise than in our usual terms of obedience to superiors. If I obey the laws of the land, I actually support its constitution, as becomes glaringly obvious in the case of revolutionaries and rebels who disobey because they have withdrawn this tacit consent.

In these terms, the nonparticipators in public life under a dictatorship are those who have refused their support by shunning those places of "responsibility" where such support, under the name of obedience, is required. And we have only for a moment to imagine what would happen to any of these forms of government if enough people would act "irresponsibly" and refuse support, even without active resistance and rebellion, to see how effective a weapon this could be. It is in fact one of the many variations of nonviolent action and resistance -- for instance the power that is potential in civil disobedience -- which are being discovered in our century. The reason, however, that we can hold these new criminals, who never committed a crime out of their own initiative, nevertheless responsible for what they did is that there is no such thing as obedience in political and moral matters. The only domain where the word could possibly apply to adults who are not slaves is the domain of religion, in which people say that they obey the word or the command of God because the relationship between God and man can rightly be seen in terms similar to the relation between adult and child.

Hence the question addressed to those who participated and obeyed orders should never be, "Why did you obey?" but "Why did you support?" This change of words is no semantic irrelevancy for those who know the strange and powerful influence mere "words" have over the minds of men who, first of all, are speaking animals. Much would be gained if we could eliminate this pernicious word "obedience" from our vocabulary of moral and political thought. If we think these matters through, we might regain some measure of self-confidence and even pride, that is, regain what former times called the dignity or the honor of man: not perhaps of mankind but of the status of being human.